“Yes,” she said. “Unlike my sister, you can remember that I broke my leg, not my brain. I can handle the truth. Keep me posted.” And with that she lurched forward and made her torturous way into the house.
Despite her protestations that she was fit as a fiddle, Betty seemed weary after lunch. The girls and I cleaned up the kitchen while Rose shepherded her sister into the bedroom and gave her a sponge bath. When she emerged, Betty was dusted with fragrant talc and wearing a peach-and-pink cotton muumuu. Rose settled her sister on the couch and handed her a Barbara Cartland novel. Gracie poured her a glass of cream soda and adjusted the floor fan so Betty could catch the breeze. Given the circumstances, Betty was as comfortable as a human being could be, but Gracie’s face was pinched with concern. She knelt beside Betty. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” she asked.
“How could I not be all right?” Betty said. “I’ve got you.”
Reassured, we said our goodbyes, piled into Rose’s Buick, and set out for home. We didn’t get far. As we were poised at the end of Betty’s driveway, prepared to turn onto the road that led to Lawyers’ Bay, Gracie leaned forward and tapped Rose on the shoulder. Her tone was beseeching.
“Could we go to the old graveyard, Rose? Please. There’s something I want to check.”
Rose craned her neck around so she could look at Gracie face to face. “Whatever do you need to check out there?”
“It has to do with our Inuksuit,” Gracie said.
“Top priority,” Rose said dryly. She glanced at her watch. “We’ve got time for a quick trip.”
Taylor groaned. “I hate cemeteries.”
Isobel played peacemaker. “I do too, but this one is neat in a tragic sort of way.”
“Well, okay,” Taylor said.
Rose and I exchanged glances. “Fine with me,” I said. The vote was in. We were on our way.
Like all very old cemeteries, Lake View had an elegiac charm, but it possessed something more rare and valuable in cottage country: it was waterfront property. On the open market it would have fetched the proverbial king’s ransom, but respect for the dead or fear of public outcry had kept speculators at bay, and Lake View looked much the same as it must have looked when it opened its gates more than a century before. The girls scampered down to the beach and, after some excited pointing and gesticulating, they resolved whatever question had drawn them to the shoreline and wandered back into the cemetery proper. Rose and I were walking among the graves too, and I wondered how the girls were reacting to these reminders of a past when entire families were wiped out by scarlet fever and brides not much older than the girls themselves died in childbirth.
We stopped by a grave that was overgrown with weeds. Rose pulled the weeds up and shook the dirt off them.
“Is someone you know buried there?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I just hate an untidy grave.” Rose took a plastic Safeway bag from her pocket and dropped the weeds in. “Compost,” she said. She cleared her throat. “I want to apologize to you about Betty,” she said. “I know she was on you like a hawk on a mouse, but I’m the one who should be blamed. My sister had a right to know what was going on with Lily.”
“What is going on with Lily?” I asked. “Rose, I wouldn’t be asking this if it wasn’t important. Taylor told me that Lily was coming back because she had nowhere else to go. Is her relationship with Alex Kequahtooway over?”
Rose looked at me in amazement. “That relationship will never be over, but it’s not what you think. It’s not a man-woman thing. They’re like one person, one blood.”
“Betty told me Alex was Lily’s protector after her mother died.”
Rose made no attempt to hide her anger. Obviously, the wound I had touched was still fresh. “Did Betty tell you people in town blamed Gloria for what happened? They said she must have led the doctor on. They called her a squaw and a whore and worse.”
“And Lily heard it all.”
“Yes. And every day she had to watch her mother climb that hill, atoning for sins she never committed.”
A breeze came up and rustled the grasses along the lake. Voices from the dead.
“Lily never got over it, you know.” Rose thumped her heart with her hand. “Something broke in here. She should be happy – nice husband, wonderful daughter, good job, beautiful houses – but she isn’t.”
“The night of the fireworks, Gracie asked Blake why her mother couldn’t just see how nice everything was.”
“Lily does see how nice everything is,” Rose said. “That’s the problem. She can’t believe she deserves a good life. So when things are going good, she unravels them, like that Penelope in the Greek story. Did you ever read that story?”
“Not since grade nine,” I said. “It was a long time ago.”
Rose laughed. “Longer ago for me, but I never forgot it. Penelope’s husband went away and all these men wanted to marry her. She was weaving something, I don’t remember what, but she told the men she couldn’t get married until she’d finished her weaving. So the men waited and waited. They didn’t know that every night Penelope went to her room and ripped out her weaving and every morning she started over.”
“You think that’s what Lily’s doing with her life?”
“I know it. My sister always tries to get me interested in romance novels. I’ve read a few, but all those happily-ever-afters just don’t ring true to me. Those Greek stories rang true – that’s probably why I still remember them after sixty years.” Rose squared her shoulders. “Would you mind herding up the girls? There are some graves I’d like to check on.”
“You have family here?”
“Everyone around here does. My parents. The aunt I’m named after. Two of my brothers. More cousins than you can shake a stick at, and, of course, Gloria.”
“I didn’t realize you and Gloria were related.”
“We’re not – at least not by blood. But on this reserve you don’t have to share a family tree to be considered family.”
As soon as we got back, the girls marched off to work on their Inukshuk. Unencumbered by the obligation to leave signposts for future generations, I went back to the cottage. When I opened the front door, the heat hit me like a wave. The Hynds had not believed in air conditioning. The memory of Betty, cool and fragrant, propelled me. I turned on the ceiling fan, found a roomy cotton nightie in my drawer for the nap I needed, and made my way to the shower to wash away a morning of dust and melancholy. The phone was ringing when I stepped out. I grabbed a towel and ran to answer.
Zack’s voice was teasing. “So were you out back milking the chickens?”
“Nope. I was just getting out of the shower…”
“That mental image may just get me through the rest of the day.”
“Troubles in your kingdom?” I said.
“Well, let’s see. The courthouse air conditioning fried itself this morning, so the building is hotter than hell. And the Crown is cleaning my clock. Apart from that, everything’s swell.”
“Come back to Lawyers’ Bay. I’ll let you sit next to the fan and score all the points.”
“Best offer I’ve had all day,” Zack said wearily. “I’ll go back in there and throw myself on the mercy of the court.”
I wasn’t up to Virginia Woolf, and Harriet Hynd’s library was short of trashy novels, so I chose a worthy book on birds of the Qu’Appelle Valley and was asleep before I turned the first page. I woke with a post-nap sense of well-being. It was three o’clock. I walked out to the road and looked towards the gazebo to check on the girls. They were toiling away in the mid-afternoon heat. Feeling guilty that I had been cool and lazy all afternoon while they worked, I sliced a loaf of banana bread, filled a Thermos with lemonade, dropped plastic cups and napkins into my beach bag, and went to assess their progress.
The girls were ready for a break. The Inukshuk was complete, but the wheelbarrow was full of rocks and more were strewn about the sand. Discovering the precise combination of stones that would fit the terrain and stack on top of one another without falling had proven difficult. Flushed with heat and effort, the girls made for the shade of the gazebo. It was the first time I’d been in the gazebo since the night Chris Altieri died, and the memories of Chris’s sadness and of Zack’s subtle menace that evening were sharp-edged and unsettling. Oblivious to anything beyond the moment, the girls poured lemonade, wolfed banana loaf, and discussed the engineering
